Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

Miss Susan Triplett has been here ever since Barby went to Washington, but she's going home soon, now that I have come back. Between them I got all the news of the town during supper. Aunt Elspeth is very, very ill. They're afraid she can't last long at this rate. They have a trained nurse for her and Belle has to spend so much of her time over there that Tippy has been taking care of little Elspeth and Judson in the daytime.

Titcomb Carver and Sammy III have both enlisted, and the two Fayal boys, Manuel and Joseph, are in the Navy. Nearly everyone I asked about was in some kind of government service. Tippy says the Portuguese boys have responded splendidly, and she keeps tab on the whole town. But she said it is a tragedy about George Woodson. He's tried four times to enlist, but he can't pass the physical examination. His sight is imperfect and the old trouble with his knee that he got from a football accident in his Junior year bars him out. Tippy never liked George. He was impudent to her one time, years ago. Ran his tongue out at her when she told him to quit doing something that she thought he had no business to do, and she never forgave him. But now she respects him so much for the desperate way he has tried to get into the service, and is so sorry for his disappointment, that she can't say nice enough things about him.

It was late when the expressman brought my trunk. Miss Susan had already gone upstairs and was putting up her front hair in crimping pins. But Tippy never made any objections when I started to unpack. I simply can't get used to being treated with so much deference. It's worth growing up just to have her listen so respectfully to my opinions and to know that she feels that my advice is worth asking for.

I only unpacked the top tray to get some things Barby and I had bought for her in the Washington shops, and to take out something she was even more interested in than her gifts. It was a little silk service flag to hang up in honor of Father. She took it in her hands as if it were sacred. I never saw her so moved to admiration over anything, as she was over that little blue star in its field of white with the red border around it.

Her voice didn't sound natural, because there was a queer sort of choke in it when she said: "I never before wanted to be a man. But I do now, just for the chance to be what that star stands for."

I had intended to wait till morning before hanging it in the front window, but she had a hammer and a push-pin out of a box in the hall closet before I knew what she was looking for, and carried the lamp ahead of me down the stairs. "Liberty enlightening the World," I called it, as she stood holding the lamp up for me to see, while I drove the push-pin into the window sash.

But she didn't laugh with me. It was a solemn thing to her, this placing of the symbol which showed the world that a patriot had gone out from the house in defence of his country. Although she's a thin, gaunt figure with her hair twisted into a hard little knot on the back of her head, and there's nothing statuesque about a black silk dress gathered full at the waist, and a ruffled white apron, her waiting attitude seemed to dignify the occasion and make a ceremony of it. I started to say something, jokingly, about firing a salute with our ancestral musket, or singing "America," but the expression on her face stopped me. The spirit of some old Revolutionary forbear seemed shining in her eyes. I hadn't dreamed that Patriotism meant that to Tippy; something exalted enough to transform her homely old features with a kind of inner shining.

Something wakened me very early next morning, soon after daybreak. Sitting up to look out of the window nearest my bed, I saw somebody hoeing in the garden. A Portuguese woman I supposed, who was taking the place of the regular gardener. Ever since old Jeremy Clapp reached his nineties, we've had his nephew, young Jeremy. But they told me the night before, that he's gone to be a surfman in the U. S. Coast patrol. It was especially hard to give him up as the war garden he had just put in was twice the size we usually have.

Then I recognized the flapping old sport hat which the woman wore. It was one which I discarded last year. Underneath it, her skirts tucked up to her shoe-tops to avoid the heavy dew, was Tippy, hoeing weeds as if she were making a personal attack on the Hindenburg line and intended demolishing it before breakfast.

Funny as she looked in her scare-crow working outfit, there was something in the sight that made me want to stand and salute. It gave me the kind of thrill one has when the troops march by, and everyone cheers as the colors pass. I can't put it into words, but it was the feeling that brusque, rheumatic old Tippy with her hoe, stood for as fine a kind of patriotism as there is in the world. She's just as eager to do some splendid, big, thrilling thing for her country as any man in khaki, yet all she can do is to whack weeds. I wish I were artist enough to make a companion piece for the poster I brought home in my trunk—a goddess of liberty unfurling a star-spangled banner across the world. I'd make a homely work-roughened old woman in her kitchen apron, her face shining like Tippy's did last night, when she looked at the star and wished she could be the hero it stood for.